A glitch with Facebook logins on Thursday evening temporarily prevented users from connecting with a wide variety of sites that use Facebook Connect to add new user accounts. While the issue has been resolved at this point, it caused a temporarily freak-out from people who suddenly couldn’t access all sorts of sites, from Buzzfeed to Pinterest to Gawker to Kickstarter.
Users were noting that after visiting several sites, they were redirected to a broken Facebook page that showed an error message. A Facebook spokeswoman wrote in an email that the issue has now been fixed:
“For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook from third party sites to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved, and Login with Facebook is now working as usual.”
The glitch with Facebook logins reminded a good deal of users just how many sites take advantage of Facebook data to allow people to quickly create accounts on third-party sites. Connecting users through Facebook can allow initially for a good deal of growth and reduced sign-in friction, but relying on a third-party platform like Facebook can certainly come with trade-offs as well.
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